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Meta Changed the Rules. Is Your Social Media Strategy Ready?
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Meta is testing new limits on how many external links brands can share on Facebook and Instagram without paying. For social media teams, it’s another reminder that platforms can change the rules — and your access to an audience — at any time.
So how should brands respond?
Build a social media strategy around customer relationships, not platform access. Use social to earn qualified attention, start conversations, identify customer intent and build trust. Then create systems that connect those relationships to channels and customer data your business controls.
As Brooke Sellas explains:
“The bottom line is social is a customer experience channel, and the brands who start treating it that way will feel this change the least.”
Meta’s latest move may have created the urgency. But the larger lesson applies to every social platform.
Here are seven ways to build a social media strategy that is less dependent on whatever the platforms decide to do next.
Why Does Meta’s Link Change Matter for Your Social Media Strategy?
Meta’s link change matters because it exposes how little control brands have over the platforms they use to reach customers.
Meta has been testing limits on external links. Some Facebook page managers have now seen notices restricting them to two links per month unless they pay for a subscription. Links in comments can count toward that limit, too.
But external links were already becoming less important on social.
Brooke points to Meta’s own reporting showing that 98.7% of post views in the United States earlier this year had no external link at all. Link posts once accounted for almost 10% of what people saw on Meta channels. Now, she says, they are around 1%.
As Brooke puts it:
“Links are already on life support. But Meta just sent you the hospital bill.”
The strategic response isn’t to fight the platforms.
It’s to build a social media strategy that doesn’t depend on them behaving the way you want.
What Should Brands Optimize for Instead of Followers?
Brands should optimize for qualified attention rather than follower count.
Social algorithms increasingly serve content based on interests, not simply on whether someone follows an account. That makes follower count a weaker measure of whether your content is reaching people who could actually become customers.
Instead, ask better questions.
Are people stopping to consume the content? Are they asking questions? Are they clicking? Are they mentioning your brand elsewhere? Do they eventually become customers?
A post with 50,000 views that reaches 4,000 potential customers may create more business value than a post with two million views that reaches people who have no reason to buy from you.
As Brooke explains:
“Reach is an input on the way to the outcome. It was never the outcome.”
The goal isn’t attention for attention’s sake. It’s attention from the right people that can lead somewhere meaningful.
How Can Brands Build an Audience They Actually Own?
Use social media as the discovery layer, then intentionally move customer relationships into channels and systems your business controls.
Social media is rented attention. Platforms can disappear, change algorithms, reduce reach or make access increasingly pay-to-play.
That doesn’t mean brands should stop using social. It means social needs a defined role in a larger customer journey.
Brooke describes the path this way:
Social → conversation → email, SMS, community or customer account → CRM → customer
The important distinction is between having access to an audience and owning the customer relationship.
Brooke offers a useful gut check:
“If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, how much of the customer relationship would we still own?”
You can substitute LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok or any other platform your brand relies on.
Your social team should be intentionally creating paths toward secure, owned spaces rather than hoping customers eventually find their way there.
How Can Comments and DMs Drive Business Results?
Treat comments and DMs as customer intent data, not simply engagement.
A customer asking, “Does this work with X?” is giving you product and purchase information.
Someone saying, “I wish you made this in silver,” is providing product intelligence.
“I’ve been looking for something like this” could signal a potential customer.
And comments from existing customers can reveal retention opportunities or risks.
Brooke shared an example from a jewelry client. Customers repeatedly asked for a product in silver. The brand used that feedback to create the product, and it sold out on the first day.
That is much more valuable than simply reporting how many comments a post received.
“Every one of these conversations, comments, questions is a trust moment.”
Brands can acknowledge customers publicly, then move verification or private information into DMs or another secure channel when needed.
As Brooke says, your social inbox is the front door to your business. It should be staffed like one.
How Do You Build a Better Social Media Content Strategy?
Start with a customer problem instead of asking what your brand should post this week.
A traditional content calendar often begins with a publishing requirement: We need five posts this week.
That creates pressure to fill empty spaces.
A customer-focused content ecosystem starts somewhere else: What problem does our customer need help solving?
For example, take the question, “I don’t know which product is right for me.”
That single customer problem could become a short educational video, comparison post, creator demonstration, FAQ, zero-click carousel, employee response, customer story, SEO or AEO article, social listening query, DM handoff or sales enablement asset.
One customer problem creates an entire ecosystem of useful content.
“Your content stops being a pile of isolated posts when you do this and starts behaving like a customer journey.”
This approach also creates the kind of useful, question-driven information that answer engines can surface.
Instead of filling a content calendar, you’re helping customers move through decisions.
What Role Should Creators Play in Your Social Media Strategy?
Creators should help brands build trust and drive meaningful action, not simply provide access to a large follower count.
Brooke isn’t arguing that influencer marketing is dead. She is questioning deals built primarily around audience size.
A better question is whether a creator can build trust, provide context and motivate the people in your ideal customer profile to act.
That makes smaller creators, subject matter experts, customers and even employees much more interesting.
Brands can evaluate creator partnerships using qualified traffic, saves and shares, conversation quality, assisted conversions, new and repeat customers, branded search lift, content reuse and acquisition cost.
Follower count?
Brooke argues that it should be near the bottom of the list — if it belongs on the list at all.
What Is the Best Use of AI in Social Media?
AI can create more value by helping teams understand customer conversations than by simply producing more social content.
Social channels generate more customer data than most human teams can reasonably process.
That’s where AI can become particularly useful.
AI can help sort thousands of social conversations into categories such as purchase intent, retention, advocacy, risk, fraud, product intelligence and competitive intelligence.
A customer saying, “I switched from X because…” contains competitive intelligence.
“I already bought this, and…” could reveal a retention opportunity or problem.
“Why doesn’t this do X?” may uncover product intelligence.
The opportunity is not simply to use AI to manufacture more posts.
“The future of AI in social looks a lot less like cranking out 10,000 posts, and more like understanding 10,000 human conversations, and then deciding which ones deserve a human response.”
That gives social media, CX and voice-of-customer teams a much more defensible use case for AI.
How Should Brands Measure Social Media Success?
Measure social media as a business function by connecting it to attention, conversations, intent, conversions, retention, intelligence and risk.
Followers, likes, impressions and viral views may still provide useful information. But they shouldn’t necessarily be the headline numbers leadership sees.
Brooke recommends a more layered model:
- Attention: reach, views and qualified impressions
- Conversation: comments, DMs, questions and sentiment
- Intent: product questions, clicks, searches, inquiries and buying signals
- Conversions: leads, purchases and assisted revenue
- Retention: resolution, repeat purchases and churn signals
- Intelligence: product insights, customer pain points and competitive signals
- Risk: escalations, emerging issues and reputation threats
This changes the leadership conversation around social media.
Instead of presenting social as a collection of posts and engagement numbers, you can demonstrate its role across customer experience, marketing, sales, retention, intelligence and voice-of-customer data.
And that makes social much harder to dismiss as an optional marketing expense.
What Makes a Social Media Strategy Resilient to Platform Changes?
A resilient social media strategy turns attention into customer relationships and business value instead of depending on reach, followers or virality alone.
Content is becoming abundant. More people and brands can create it.
Virality is becoming less scarce. Algorithms can introduce almost anyone’s content to new audiences.
And follower count becomes less powerful when people don’t need to follow you to see your content.
As Brooke explains:
“Anything that stops being scarce loses its standalone value.”
So where does competitive advantage move?
Toward relevance, trust, data, relationships and the systems that turn attention into business value.
Brooke says the brands that win over the next few years will be the ones with better customer relationships.
That brings us back to the real lesson behind Meta’s latest change:
“Social is a customer experience channel, and the brands who start treating it that way will feel this change the least.”
You can’t control when Meta, Instagram, LinkedIn or another platform changes the rules.
You can control whether your entire social media strategy depends on those rules staying the same.
Stay Ahead of the Next Social Media Fire Drill
Platform news moves fast. And too often, it becomes urgent when someone on your leadership team forwards an article and asks, “Thoughts?”
That’s why Brooke created Social Care Weekly.
Every week, she breaks down the latest platform changes, the data behind them and what they actually mean for your social care team, social media team, leadership conversations and customers.
No fluff. No trend chasing. Just the information you need to understand what changed — and what your business should do about it.
Sign up for Social Care Weekly at bsquared.media/newsletter.
Read the Transcript
[00:00:00] When Followers and Virality Lose Their Value
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: When everyone can create content, content gets abundant. When anyone can go viral, virality gets cheap. And when algorithms can serve anyone’s content to anyone, followers stop being scarce. Anything that stops being scarce loses its standalone value.
So the new competitive advantage comes down to relevance, trust, data, relationships, and having a real system for turning this attention into business value.
[00:00:41] Meta Just Put a Price on Your Links
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Hey, hey, and welcome back to this Social Media CX podcast. I’m your host, Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, author of Conversations That Connect, and today we’re talking about how Meta has decided that if you want to link on any of your Facebook, Instagram pages, that you’re gonna have to pay them a monthly invoice.
So here’s what happened. Meta has been testing this for quite some time, but last week, a bunch of Facebook page managers opened their accounts and got a pop-up. The message said more or less, “You now get two links in your post every month.” If you want more than those two links, and yes, y’all, this counts as like, “Oh, I’ll just put the link in the first comment,” guess what?
The links in the comments, those count too. If you want more than two links a month, that’s what this subscription is for. Plans are starting at $14.99 a month, but that literally only gets you two links, and climb to about $500 a month. Oh, and by the way, Facebook is separate from Instagram, so you could pay for Instagram, but you still gotta pay for Facebook.
The image that I’m sharing right now is being circulated on Threads by Facebook ads guru John Loomer. Love him. Just search John Loomer Facebook ads and you will find him. I highly suggest you follow him.
Much like you, I wanted to rage quit Facebook as soon as I heard this, but let me give you a different way to look at it.
According to Meta’s own reporting, 98.7% of post views in the United States earlier this year had no external link at all. We’ve already been practicing for zero-click marketing. We already know that Facebook throttles, Facebook and other platforms, Meta, not just Meta, but like LinkedIn, for instance, they throttle reach for posts that have a link.
Why? Because they take you off platform. Back in, I think it was 2022, link posts were almost 10% of what people saw on Meta channels. Now, they’re only around 1%. So links are already on life support. But Meta just sent you the hospital bill.
[00:03:14] Stop Treating the Platform Like Your Business
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Here’s where I land on this. I don’t think the smart play is fighting the platforms.
The smart play is to stop treating the platforms like they are your business. For years, the social playbook went like this: build followers, get some reach, go viral, monetize said reach. But that model is collapsing in real time. The sequence that modern brands need to look more at is this. You need to earn attention, create conversations, , capture intent, build relationships, convert, and retain.
If you’ve listened to this show more than once, you know I have big feelings about that second step. So let’s run down the seven moves I’d put in front of any brand right now, especially if you’re enterprise, luxury, or financial services. And especially if you have a social care program, ’cause, hi, we use a lot of links in social care to help customers who need support. This is gonna massively affect us.
[00:04:23] Move 1: Stop Optimizing for Followers
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Move number one is I want you to stop optimizing for followers. Hopefully, you’ve already done this, but in talking to brands on the daily, unfortunately, a lot of people are still looking for number of followers. But instead of doing that, I want you to optimize for qualified attention.
What does that mean? Algorithms now serve content based on interest, not on who follows you. So that makes follower count a pretty weak stand-in for business value. It’s always been weak in my opinion, but now it’s even weaker. The better questions to ask yourself sound like this. Are people seeing this?
Are they stopping? Am I stopping the scroll? Are they commenting and asking questions? Are they clicking, mentioning us elsewhere, and actually or eventually becoming customers? A post with 50,000 views that reaches 4,000 people who could actually buy from you is probably more than a 2 million view post that reaches everyone and their cousin.
Reach is an input on the way to the outcome. It was never the outcome. So let’s stop thinking about followers and reach in that way.
[00:05:44] Move 2: Build an Audience You Actually Own
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Number two, I want you to build an owned audience alongside your rented attention. I’m sorry to say social is rented attention because at any time these platforms can go away.
Many of them have. Or they could make it even more pay-to-play, as we’ve seen Meta and other sites doing gradually over the years. This is the biggest strategic shift, and Meta basically just put a price on it for you. Social should be your discovery layer.
The relationship should live somewhere you control. Think of the path as social, then conversation, then email or SMS or community or a customer account, then your CRM, then a customer. Here’s the gut check I want every brand asking: If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, how much of the customer relationship would we still own?
Obviously, insert your platform of choice or any platform you use into that statement. If LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, how much of the customer relationship would I still own? I’d be devastated. I use LinkedIn a lot for networking. It’s huge for my business, but I own all of our customer relationships elsewhere, right?
For financial service brands, you already have a head start because your customers have accounts and apps. The question for you is whether or not your social team is intentionally moving people towards those secure owned spaces or just hoping they wander on over. Please don’t hope. They won’t wander.
[00:07:27] Move 3: Treat Comments and DMs as Intent Data
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Move three, treat comments and DMs as a conversion channel. My favorite one. Shocking, I know. Most brands still treat comments as an engagement metric, but I want you to treat them as intent data. When someone asks, “Does this work with X?” you’re looking at a product question. When someone says, “I wish you made this in blue or in silver,” like we talk about in some of our case studies from our jewelry client, that’s product intelligence.
That, that… Taking that we knew all these people wanted silver and then creating that, that piece in silver, it sold out. The first day we launched it, it sold out, right? This is product intelligence, buying intelligence. If somebody says, “I’ve been looking for something like this,” that’s a potential new customer raising their hand.
And if somebody says something like, “I’ve bought this, and”, you’re looking at a retention moment, whether that’s good or bad. In fintech, this often sounds like, “Does your app work with my payroll provider?” Or, “Why did my card get declined at the gas station?” Every one of these conversations, comments, questions is a trust moment.
You acknowledge publicly, move verification and details to DM or a secure channel, and resolve it there. Your social inbox is the front door to your business, so start staffing it like one.
[00:08:54] Move 4: Build a Customer Journey, Not a Content Calendar
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Number four, build a content ecosystem instead of a content calendar. The old way of thinking is we need five posts this week. The better way of thinking starts with one customer problem and builds out from there. Say the problem is I don’t know which product is right for me.
From that one problem, you can create a short educational video, a comparison post, a creator demo, a FAQ, zero-click carousel, an employee response, a customer story, an SEO and AEO article, a social listening query, a DM handoff, a sales enablement asset. Literally, the sky’s the limit. So when you think about it from the customer problem viewpoint and build from there, there’s endless opportunities.
But when we think we need five posts this week, all of a sudden we’re like, “Oh, what do we post about? I don’t know. Let’s post about the cat holiday.” Please don’t. Now, your content stops being a pile of isolated posts when you do this and starts behaving like a customer journey. This also happens to be exactly what answer engines like to surface, so this is helping you in so many ways, not just with your social media marketing.
[00:10:14] Move 5: Use Creators to Build Trust, Not Just Reach
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Move five, I want you to make creators part of your trust infrastructure. I’m not going to tell you that influencer marketing is dead, but I will tell you that influencer deals based mostly on audience size, remember what that move number one was, are getting really hard to justify. The better question is, “Can this creator build trust, give context, and make people take action with the people and the audiences we want with our ICP, ideal customer profile?”
That makes smaller creators, subject matter experts, your customers, and your own employees a lot more interesting. And you measure them on qualified traffic, saves and shares, conversation quality, assisted conversions, new and repeat customers, branded search lift, content reuse, and acquisition cost.
How many followers do they have should be close to the bottom of that list. Maybe not even on the list at all.
[00:11:23] Move 6: Use AI to Understand the Conversation
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Move six, I want you to use AI to understand the conversation instead of trying to just manufacture it. So there is so much social data out there, more than any human team can reasonably process, and that’s where AI really earns its keep, at least for us.
AI can help you sort through thousands of conversations into buckets like acquisition or intent to buy, “I’m consider buying this,” right? Or retention, “I already bought this, and”, whatever the good or bad outcome is. Advocacy, “I love this product because X.” Risk, “This company just…” Or fraud, right? Or product intelligence, like we talked about earlier, “Why doesn’t this do X?”
And there’s also competitive intelligence, “I switched from X because…” Right? Huge competitive intelligence there. The future of AI in social looks a lot less like cranking out 10,000 posts, and more like understanding 10,000 human conversations, and then deciding which ones deserve a human response.
That is a far more defensible use of AI, and frankly, far more useful for anyone on your social media team or your CX team or your voice of customer team, whatever it may be.
[00:12:54] Move 7: Measure Social Like a Business Function
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: The last move, move seven, is to measure social like a business function. This is the one that keeps your social team funded, by the way.
I’d move brands away from followers, likes, impressions, maybe even engagement rate, unless it’s a meaningful engagement, and viral views as the headline numbers, the things that are on the reports, and I’d move them instead towards a more layered model. And these are the layers I would have you think about.
Attention. Attention could be reach, views, or qualified impressions. Conversation, obviously a big one. Comments, DMs, questions, sentiment of those conversations, right, was it good, negative, neutral? I’d also look at intent. This is a big one for us. So product questions, clicks, searches, inquiries, buying intent questions.
Then I would look at conversions; leads, purchases, assisted revenue. That’s always been important. Retention is another big one, so I’m looking for resolution, repeat purchases, churn signals that are happening through my social media conversations and reviews. Intelligence would be things like product insights, customer pain points, competitive signals. And then especially for our highly regulated friends, I would look at risk, so escalations, emerging issues, reputation threats.
This works for everyone because obviously as we see a rise in negative sentiment, obviously, uh, that could turn into a PR crisis, but especially for our highly regulated friends, risk is something we always like to look at. And when you report on social this way, it gets really hard to cut because you’re showing leadership its role in CX, in marketing, in sales, in retention, in intelligence, in voice of customer data.
Good luck putting those kinds of things on the chopping block. Gonna be a lot harder than just social.
[00:15:07] The New Competitive Advantage Is Customer Relationships
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: The bigger point that I want to make here is if, if we zoom out for a second, because I do think the creator economy is going through the exact same thing that social media itself went through. When everyone can create content, content gets abundant.
When anyone can go viral, virality gets cheap. And when algorithms can serve anyone’s content to anyone, followers stop being scarce. Anything that stops being scarce loses its standalone value. That’s just economics. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, Meta does, apparently, and then they bill you monthly for it.
So the new competitive advantage comes down to relevance, trust, data, relationships, and having a real system for turning this attention into business value. The brands that win over the next few years, especially on social, will be the ones with better customer relationships. Audience size is a much smaller piece of that than we’ve all been told or been led to believe.
[00:16:23] Why a CX Strategy Makes Platform Changes Hurt Less
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: The bottom line is social is a customer experience channel, and the brands who start treating it that way will feel this change the least.
[00:16:35] Stay Ahead of the Next Social Media Fire Drill
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media: Here’s the thing about platform news like this, it moves fast and usually lands on your desk and becomes a fire drill.
That’s exactly why I write the Social Care Weekly. Every week I break down the latest platform changes, the data behind them, and what they actually mean for your care team, your social media team, your leadership conversations, and your customers. There’s no fluff or trend chasing. It’s just the stuff you need before your boss forwards you the article with, “Thoughts?” In the subject line. You can sign up at bsquared.media/newsletter, and I’ll see you in your inbox every Wednesday.
That’s it for today’s episode. I know it was a lot, and if this one got you thinking, share it with your team or tag me on LinkedIn and tell me how you’re handling the link cap. I would love to know and maybe even have you on the show.
Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Social Media CX Podcast on YouTube. And if your team is thinking about what responsible social listening in banking or financial services actually looks like at scale, check out the State of Social Care Report 2026.
Finally, as always, Think conversation, not campaign.™
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Brooke B. Sellas is an award-winning Customer Marketing Strategist and the CEO & Founder of B Squared Media. Her book, Conversations That Connect has been recognized nationally and is required reading for a Customer Experience class at NSU.
Brooke's influence in digital marketing is not just about her accomplishments but also about her unwavering commitment to elevating the industry standard of digital customer experience and customer marketing.
Latest posts by Brooke B. Sellas (See All)
- Meta Changed the Rules. Is Your Social Media Strategy Ready? - October 7, 2026
- Your NPS Score May Be Ignoring Your Most Important Customers - September 30, 2026
- Customer Warning Signs: What Happens Before Chargebacks and Churn - September 23, 2026
Written by award-winning strategist Brooke Sellas, this weekly 5-minute power-up will help you turn social interactions into loyalty, retention, and revenue.
Written by award-winning strategist Brooke Sellas, this weekly 5-minute power-up will help you turn social interactions into loyalty, retention, and revenue.
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